Drupal is great at many things, but fetching many bits of data from the network quickly isn't one of them. Fetching during page building slows down your response time. Fetching during cron requires a full bootstrap and can time out. Plus, it's hard to do efficient non-blocking requests in PHP. Some people might say you'd have to learn a whole new programming language to fix this—but you probably already know JavaScript! So let's use node.js.

We'll look at what you need to get started for this use-case:

• Why Drupal isn't good at this
• node,js basics
• Asynchronous networking
• Promises
• Communicating between nodejs and Drupal